The ideas behind the project.
When we began our daily reposting of trending retirement articles in 2013, we posed these questions – by collecting and organizing the most popular current retirement social media and press advice articles from around the globe, could we:
(1) capture the full range of issues that consumers and advisors must address in a successful retirement- in essence, mapping the entire “Retirement Genome”?
(2) identify the mega-themes of retirement advice?
(3) cluster and analyze articles to identify consensus, and best practices?
(4) give access to this collected wisdom to interested consumers and advisors – mainly for younger advisors giving them “virtual grey hair”?
Collecting Retirement Wisdom: “Nobody knows as much as everybody” (author unknown)
This document contains our partial collection of web links to the retirement articles we have reposted.
We daily review such articles, mainly from news aggregator software (currently using FlipBoard), that are getting traction on social media. By selecting from articles that the public find worth clicking and forwarding to others, this validates the article content has struck a chord. We select the most interesting – seeking to find topics not otherwise covered already, or which have updated data, or which provide a new twist on thinking. These are posted on the Canadian Retirement Mentoring Group LinkedIn page and Face Book page (find it at @retirementmentoring). We have assembled our re-postings into a master alpha list.
Caveats: the article selection process is not scientific -while using trending retirement articles from the web via a news aggregator with ½ million subject followers, we still apply our own subjective filters of what is most interesting and useful. In addition, unlike the mapping of the human genome, this project is never complete. Much like “The Longevity Project” http://www.howardsfriedman.com/longevityproject/
What we have been learning…
After about 2000 posts, we are learning a number of things:
- we still have relatively little difficulty daily finding new articles to post without duplicating what has already been collected – this subject area is vast
- lots of the worthwhile facts and advice are micro in nature but contribute meaningfully to a worthwhile collective-wisdom whole
- there is an enormous amount for an advisor to absorb (younger advisors in particular), keep up-to-date, and integrate into practice
- the issues go vastly beyond the financial realm – in fact, we gravitated fundamentally to start with health, happiness and well being, with finances being only one of a list of subject areas to pay attention to
- human behavior – both virtuous or short sighted, seems to be at the heart of success or failure…. generally focusing on the trade off between the now and the future in terms of gratification. The marshmallow test seems to capture the idea well. http://www.forbes.com/sites/learnvest/2014/12/15/the-marshmallow-test-4-science-supported-tips-for-saving-for-retirement/#63cf54e4470d
- There is no magic bullet for sustainable retirement income – but a variety of strategies can help… income bucketing, dividend paying stock/index portfolios, low fees, modest living and retirement expectations, part-time work in retirement, judicious use of annuities, and not expecting money to be the primary engine to happiness.
Canadian Retirement Mentoring Group 